Submission Guidelines

Chapter 16 welcomes all reader comments and emails. For other kinds of contributions, we offer the following guidelines:

If you are an author with a Tennessee connection and wish to have your book considered for review, please contact the editor with publication information. Keep in mind, however, that we are a nonprofit organization with a small staff and a smaller freelance budget. As much as we would like to, we just don’t have the resources to cover every book released by a Tennessee writer. Except in the case of poetry collections, we consider for review only titles that have been traditionally published and positively reviewed by one of the pre-publication review organizations (Kirkus, PW, Library Journal, or Booklist). We don’t review self-published books, or subsidy-published books, of any kind.

We print poetry by invitation only, generally in the form of a book excerpt published in connection with a public reading. Please don’t send unsolicited poetry submissions.

Original essays, on the other hand, we’d love to consider for publication on the site, and we welcome submissions from anyone with a Tennessee connection, whether or not you’ve published a book. Our personal essays are narrative in structure, a short story that happens to be true. We aren’t interested in literary analysis or op-ed style arguments. We look for poetic essays, funny essays, thought-provoking essays — any essay that tells a story in an engaging or imaginative way. To submit an essay for possible publication, please paste the essay itself into the body of an email and send it to the editor of Chapter 16. Ideal length: 900-1,500 words, give or take a few hundred. Payment on acceptance: $100.

Because of the long lead time involved in covering a book, and because we want our articles to be as timely as possible, reviews and interviews are assigned months in advance of a book’s appearance in stores. If you’d like to contribute book reviews in the future, please contact us with an email of introduction, along with links to other published reviews.

Advertising at Chapter 16:

We offer advertising space for sale only to publishers, booksellers, and arts and cultural organizations. No more than four ads will run during the same period, with a different ad appearing randomly each time a reader clicks into the site or moves to a new page. Space is available for the following rates:

One month: $300

Three weeks: $230

Two weeks: $155

One week: $80

Ad copy should come to us as a .jpg file that’s 600 pixels wide by 500 pixels high at 72 dpi. (The ad will run at half that size, but a larger file produces a clearer image.) If you need us to create the ad to your specs, there will a small extra charge. Please contact us to make arrangements.